Multiverse Paradox

If you stop by often you know that I love some paradoxes. I came across both the below articles and they got some spider webs off the hamster wheel in my head, and both of them have some very interesting ideas.

I like this theory and if it is true is very cool. However there are a few things, one of which I am pissed that I never thought of, and another thing that I would like to look at further. First I want to talk about the fact that if there are an infinite number of universes out there, then wouldn’t that theoretically make all things possible? That is what I was thinking, but the article says otherwise. I would like to say that the person writing and those responding in the comments are surely smarter than myself, but I cannot follow their logic. Statically speaking I would think that almost all things were possible.

This is the way it was explained to me. Let’s say that you take the binding off the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, that book has over 550,000 words so printed in normal book form that is quite a few pages. Now let’s say that you take the unbound pages and throw them in the air, when they land you gather them up make sure all the corners match up and it is nice and neat. Then you start to read from page one, but as soon as you start reading you quickly notice that page one is not page one, it is page 427. The pages are in no particular order what so ever. So you decide to try again to throw them up in the air and get them to get back in the original order. Again you fail as the pages are in no particular order and you cannot read the novel.

Let’s suppose that the odds of getting those pages in the exact chronological reading order, that is the real page one to the real final end is some non 0 number. So no matter how small that number it is theoretically possible. Following that logic if given an eternity and an infinite number of throws you would eventually get one time, maybe more, where the pages will land in their correct reading order. Have I lost you yet? The point I am trying to make is that so long as there is a chance no matter how small, given enough time and opportunity that thing will happened. (There is also a larger issue of entropy here, but I do not want to get into that for the purposes of this argument. But if you are interested entropy (chaos) always increases. In nature things always goes from a highly ordered state to a disordered one, this describes the second law of thermodynamics. So the glass will always break, the egg will scramble, our cells break down, from order to disorder. So then how is it that the universe which was highly ordered in the beginning, but is now heading toward chaos more and more entropy, create us, very highly ordered beings. A system such as the universe should not be able to create pockets of order in the midst of increasing entropy, or so some think, yet here we are. I am not making the argument that evolution violates second law of thermodynamics, because it does not. The law clearly states that in a closed system entropy increases. Earth is not a closed system, there are things outside the earth that can affect us, i.e. the sun or a giant asteroid. The argument I am making is that, I think most scientists think, the universe is a closed system, so how do highly ordered beings appear in the midst of the increase of entropy. I think the answer is that there are some pockets in the universe where entropy either is slower or mostly nonexistent. Anyways I digress, I think I have valid questions, and am positive I am missing some of the science for this argument. Moving on…)

I think the article says that, that a butterfly should be able to give birth to a dragon in some parallel universe. As awesome as I think that would be, I believe the odds of that happening are 0, meaning there is no possible way that could happen. For one dragons do not exist, and the genetic makeup for a butterfly to give birth to such a creature is not possible. Therefore not matter how much time and opportunity that will never occur because the chances of that are 0, 0 given infinity is still going to be 0. I think that is what they are trying to say, but I could be interpreting that wrong. If I am, then I will need someone to explain it to me in another way, because I think statistically so long as the event has a non 0 chance of happening then, given infinity it will occur.

The second part of the article I wanted to talk about is that given infinite parallel universes, shouldn’t there be one where there are no parallel universes. (Insert gif of head exploding, I seriously would have put one in, but I don’t know how.) This is what I was mad about that I did not think about before. I have no answer for this one. In all honestly I am not sure I really understand the idea behind it. If a universe did not have parallel universes what would it look like? Would it appear different from this one, or as the person suggest perhaps this is that universe, that we are currently living in. Either way how could we tell, that is what I was getting at. So at the end of the day I love the paradox but there is no way to tell one way or the other. Unless we find a way to prove the existence of other parallel universes, then that would eliminate we are living in that one. But if we cannot detect them, there could be that there truly are no other parallel universes, or that we are living in the one that does not have any, thus the paradox. I guess my hope is that we do detect them so we can have at least one answer, instead of two no’s that could both be right.

Here is something else to think about when it comes to parallel universes.

The above article talks more about the actual science behind the multiverse theory and how a new universe could branch off. The scary and crazy part about this is that believe it or not this is actually a real possibility. There could be an infinite number of universes out there where every decision you make or didn’t make branches off into a whole new universe. So for whatever reason with all your decisions you have arrived in this seemly normal universe.

The idea that there is another you or me out there that is basically the same or maybe totally different is a strange thought. Again I think if we go back to the statistical aspect of what I mentioned above, I think that so long as some event in your life has a non 0 value it should be possible to happen. What is also interesting to think about is how some small decision or choice would drastically change your life. The numbers discussed in this article are unfathomable in every sense of the word. Which again goes to show, at least to me, that I think in some real sense when dealing with the universe, or multiverse, because our mental capacity is very finite, we will never fully understand the universe we live in.